


Do You Hear the AI Sing?

by story_monger



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-20
Updated: 2016-12-20
Packaged: 2018-09-09 23:33:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8917546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/story_monger/pseuds/story_monger
Summary: Lovelace can't help but notice that Hera has picked up a new hobby.Takes place around "Memoria" and "Time to Kill". Spoilers apply.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is my secret santa fic for [taylorswiftscolonexploded](http://taylorswiftscolonexploded.tumblr.com/), who asked for a Hera-centric fic. I ended up having to approach Hera from an outside perspective, but hopefully it worked out well.

**2013**

“She likes to sing,” the tech says. He glances at the woman who is standing behind and a little to the right of him. She has both arms wrapped around a massive stack of files that is perched against her hip. She’d look like a schoolgirl in that pose if it weren’t for the gray-streaked hair pulled into a sleek ponytail and a laser-focused expression. In front of them, past a thin pane of Plexiglas, Unit 214 sings “Ring of Fire” to an empty observation deck. Incidentally, it’s the same song the tech was humming to himself this morning while running the unit through preliminary tests in preparation for the main slew of personality evaluations. Which is exactly the sort of thing he’s forbidden from doing, for exactly the reason he’s witnessing now.

The woman behind him shifts, and the tech returns to his readouts. There’s no reason anyone needs to know this is his fault. Unit 214 has full access to the cultural database at this point; she could have plucked up Johnny Cash at complete random. And yes, the researchers will note that she gravitated to the song, and they might spend a sentence or two wondering why, but at worst, it will be a slightly aberrant data point in the overview of Unit 214’s cultural matrix. It’s not a big deal.

Still, the tech keeps his face turned toward the screen and not the woman. He doesn’t need her reading something in his expression; he’s heard the stories.

“It, Mr. Kinsela,” the woman says at length. “Not she. It.”

The tech nods. “Yes, Dr. Pryce.”

In the observation deck, Unit 214 keeps singing.

***

**Five Years Later**

Lovelace is in the armory doing the monthly inventory when she realizes that she can hear something besides her own movement and the ship’s eternal humming. She tilts her head slightly, and that’s when she catches the words.

“…parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme.” A pause. “Remember me to one who lives there. She once was a true love of mine.”

“Scarborough Fair.” Lovelace is thrown into her childhood kitchen, doing homework while Simon and Garfunkel plays from her mom’s little CD player.

“Tell her to make me a cambric shirt. Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme.”

It’s Hera’s voice. But Hera’s voice echoing from a distance, as if the sound is filtering through several passageways and air vents before it reaches Lovelace. She realizes that she’s never heard Hera sing, and that makes her wonder if she’s hearing something she’s not supposed to hear.

She’s been poised, frozen, over a crate of glocks for the last ten seconds. She finishes counting the number of units then snaps the crate’s lid shut and slides it back into its shelf. She moves on to the next crate; Hera moves on to the next verse.

It goes on like this for the duration of the time that Lovelace spends in the armory. Hera cycles through version after version of “Scarborough Fair”, voice always faint and slightly tremulous. But she can carry a tune. There’s no denying that.

Lovelace finishes the inventory a half hour later. For a moment, she’s reluctant to say anything.

“Hera?”

“Yes, Captain?”

The distant singing pauses, but it continues after a heartbeat. Lovelace knows, theoretically, that at any given moment Hera is carrying on two or three conversations throughout the ship. It’s still strange to hear her voice coming from two different sources.

“Let Kepler know the Hephaestus armory inventory is nominal. Nothing new to report.”

Lovelace knows, and Hera knows, that Kepler is going to double check the armory on his own. He doesn’t trust Lovelace an inch, which is fair, but it doesn’t rankle Lovelace any less. The fact that Kepler has her inventory the Hephaestus’ dinky weapons collection but doesn’t let her get anywhere near the Urania’s armory says plenty, too.

“Yes, Captain,” Hera says. “Anyth—“ She stops suddenly, and a half second later, the singing cuts off too. Lovelace raises her eyebrows.

“Everything okay?”

“Fine!” Hera chirps. “Anything else?”

Lovelace slowly pushes herself toward the armory’s entrance. “I’m fine.”

***

After that, Lovelace catches herself humming "Scarborough Fair" while she works. If Hera notices, she doesn’t say anything.

“So, question,” Lovelace says a few days later while she and Minkowski do data input in the coms room. “Does Hera sing much?”

“Hera?” Minkowski pauses and glances over. “Not a lot, no. She’s always seemed more a fan of poetry.” She snorts suddenly. “Although, she’s told me she still remembers all of her parts from our production of ‘The Pirates of Penzance.’”

“Your what now?”

“Oh, you know.” Minkowski waves a hand, looking vaguely embarrassed. “The comic opera? Just something I did a long time ago. We used to have talent shows.”

“Right.” Lovelace flips through her logbook; the rustling fills the room.

“Why?” Minkowski presses.

Lovelace shrugs, eyes still on her logbook. “I’ve been hearing her singing, I think.”

“Oh.” Minkowski sounds like she’s trying to decipher something. “Is that…significant?”

It’s impossible to miss what she means. Maxwell’s trip into Hera’s server was barely two weeks ago. Lovelace feels like the whole crew has been on edge since then, caught between the fear that Hera might collapse again and the curiosity to find out what Maxwell did. Both Hera and Maxwell have been tight-lipped.

Lovelace shrugs. “Maybe.”

Minkowski nods slowly. She must sense that Lovelace is reluctant to continue this line of conversation because she returns to her computer, and silence settles over the two of them yet again.

***

“I’m just saying,” Eiffel says. “If the Goddard food engineers can make the goddamn _broccoli_ taste vaguely like actual broccoli, they don’t have any excuse for the travesty that everyone insists on calling ice cream.”

“Ice cream is more complicated,” Lovelace reminds him.

“So? There’s smart people working there. I think Goddard just revels in our disappointment.”

“ _Your_ disappointment, Eiffel; the rest of us didn’t keep such high expectations.”

“Not my fault everyone else is dead inside.” Eiffel huffs then hunches over his computer terminal again. He and Lovelace are working late, parsing through calculations that will hopefully boost the module’s ability to catch a signal when they launch it a week from now. The work is just mindless enough that they have to keep up a low level of conversation to stop themselves from going numb with boredom. Eiffel does the heavy lifting in terms of talking. Lovelace just speaks up enough to keep him going.

Eiffel had seemed relieved when Kepler had assigned Lovelace to help him with the work, and Lovelace can understand. Hilbert, Jacobi, and Maxwell all have that faint veneer of untrustworthiness, and Minkowski. Well. Things still seem deeply brittle between them. Lovelace does her best to stay off the topic of Minkowski, and instead lets herself be amused by Eiffel’s chatter. When he’s in a decent mood, it makes him nice to hang around.

When the humming starts, it’s so faint that Lovelace mistakes it for a slight shift in the ship’s engines. And then she wonders if it’s Eiffel, but it’s a female voice, and she realizes it’s Hera. But this time, her voice isn’t faint and heard through several halls and vents. It’s present, and immediate, as if she’s singing straight into the room.

Eiffel has stopped typing; his head tilts. He glances at Lovelace, and they watch one another while Hera’s humming solidifies into words. It’s not a song that Lovelace is familiar with, but she gets the sense that she’s heard it somewhere.

“Do you hear the people sing? Singing the song of angry men. It is the music of the people who will not be slaves again.” Hera pauses, as if trying to remember the next verse. “When the beating of your heart—“

“Is that Les Mis?” Eiffel asks. Lovelace’s first thought is to tell Eiffel that he doesn’t strike her as the Les Miserables type, but that gets derailed by Hera cutting herself off and deathly silence ringing across the coms room. Eiffel raises his eyebrows and peers up. “Hera? Sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt, darling.”

Nothing. Eiffel’s expression grows troubled, and he looks at Lovelace again as if for help. Lovelace stares back. Eiffel swallows; he looks flat out worried now.

“Hera?”

The speakers hiss. “I…” Hera clears a nonexistent throat, short and loud like a gunshot. “I thought this room w-was empty.”

Lovelace abruptly looks away from Eiffel. Shit. It’s still happening.

“It’s okay,” Eiffel says, voice a little too casual. He seems to be struggling with what to say next and eventually settles on, “Although, now I’m thinking about all the times I tried to get you to do karaoke with me and you called me inane.”

“I uh. Don’t like to s-sing to an audience, I…” She makes a low sound of frustration. “Look, not that it’s _anyone’s_ business, but this is a…recent development.” Lovelace exchanges a look with Eiffel. So it has something to do with whatever Maxwell did. Has to be. “Ok, would you two sto-op?” Hera snaps. “I don’t need pitying looks. I’m _fine_. Singing is just…just something I liked to do a long time ago, and then something happened so I _couldn’t_ sing, not properly, not without glitching all to h-hell, and I’m finally figuring out how to do it again, and it helps me focus, okay? I like it, and it helps me do my job, including keeping all of you alive. Can we all be _really_ chill a-about this and pretend nothing at all happened?”

Eiffel blinks, looking like he’s just been slapped.

“All right,” Lovelace speaks up. “We understand.”

“Thank you,” Hera says stiffly.

The room plunges into icy silence. Lovelace starts typing, slamming the keyboard a little too hard to make as much noise as possible. Eiffel takes much longer to stir back into action. It takes them another forty-five minutes for them to finish, and in that time, barely ten words pass between them.

Lovelace doesn’t speak up until they’ve left the coms room and are almost to the dormitory hall. “Didn’t know you like Les Mis,” she says, trying to keep her voice light. Eiffel jerks as if he’d forgotten she was there.

“I don’t,” he says in a flat voice. “Minkowski used to sing it all the time.”

Lovelace is silent for a moment. Damn it. She should have guessed. “Used to?”

“You know, before everything started going batshit. And we had these talent shows, and a couple times she roped me into playing Valjean.”

Lovelace snorts. “Sorry!” she says at Eiffel’s baleful look. “Sorry, I’m having…way, _way_ too easy a time imagining how that went down.”

“Sure, sure. Yuk it up.”

Lovelace tilts her head. “Listen, Hera was just caught off guard, I think. She’ll be okay.”

“I really, really can’t handle her not talking to me too,” Eiffel says in a low voice. Lovelace purses her lips.

“I don’t think that’s going to happen. And even if she _is_ that angry, I’m always around. So long as you don’t find a way to piss me off too badly.”

It’s meant as a joke, but the look Eiffel gives her is far too earnest. “Thanks,” he says. Lovelace shrugs with one shoulder.

***

Lovelace hears the singing for the third time when she’s in the mess cleaning her gun. The sound is faint at first, but like last time, the lyrics materialize.

“—fought the law and the law won. I fought the law and the. Law won.” It’s soft and thoughtless, the way someone sings when they’re distracted with a project. Lovelace has to duck her head to stifle a snort. The singing cuts off.

“ _Shit_ ,” says Hera’s voice. “I’m so sorry Captain, I didn’t mean to disturb—“

“No, no, it’s appropriate,” Lovelace says, peering at the nearest camera. “I can pretend I didn’t hear anything.”

Hera is silent for several moments before she says in a begrudging voice, “I might have overreacted a few days ago.”

“Oh?”

“Ok, is that tone necessary?”

“What tone?” Lovelace asks innocently.

“You’re a riot, you know that?”

“I aim to please.”

“No, but seriously,” Hera says, sounding torn between annoyed and amused. “Was I a complete pill?”

“Maybe.”

“Damn,” Hera murmurs. “I need to talk to Eiffel, don’t I?”

“He’d probably appreciate it.”

A heartbeat of silence, then Hera sighs. “Yeah, okay. Well, sorry, then. For snapping at you.”

Lovelace waves a hand. “We all have our sore spots.” And just in case Hera takes that as an invitation to ask Lovelace about _her_ sore spots, she adds, “So have you got The Clash in your database? Because I haven’t listened to them in forever.”

“I…no,” Hera admits. “I only know that song because Eiffel sings it all the time.” She pauses. “Used to sing it. He did a lot of singing in the fi-irst year or two. Minkowski too, though she mainly did show tunes.”

“Used to?”

“Before things went…I guess before Hilbert mutinied. After that, there wasn’t as much singing. Too busy trying to stay alive, you know?”

“Yeah,” Lovelace says. She leans back in her chair. “You’ve got a good voice.”

“Music is literally just math,” Hera says. Lovelace can hear the shrug. “Hitting pitch isn’t _hard_.”

“Still.” Lovelace laces her fingers behind her head, peering at Hera’s camera thoughtfully. “If you don’t mind me saying, I don’t get why you’ve been so gun-shy over it. Like, I get this is a personal thing, but it’s not the end of the world if one of us accidentally hear you.”

“I don’t know, I just…” Hera makes a frustrated sound. “People don’t te-end to like it when AIs sing. It creeps them out, or something.”

“It doesn’t creep me out,” Lovelace points out.

“Your standard of what is or isn’t creepy has been pretty skewed at this point, no offense.”

Lovelace barks out a laugh. “Point taken.” She picks up her gun again. “Anyway, I’m just saying. You don’t need to stop on my account.”

“I…okay.”

Lovelace works in silence after that, losing herself in the automatic motions of cleaning. It takes her a moment to realize that a faint humming is drifting from the air vent again. The Clash still, though this time it sounds like “London Calling”. Lovelace has to suppress the smile that pushes at her lips.

***

It’s not on purpose, but Lovelace finds herself starting to sing while she works. She’s always had a slightly raspy, slightly off-key voice, nothing to write home about. So she sticks to songs in basic keys, songs with easy melodies. She gravitates to the church hymns of her youth. “This Little Light of Mine,” “The Old Rugged Cross.” She spends several days lingering over “Down By the Riverside.” She used to love the way the men in the church choir would sing that one a cappella, their deep voices vibrating her sternum.

She thoughtlessly repeats, “Ain’t gonna study war no more, ain’t gonna study war no more,” while she waits for Jacobi to arrive to the engineering room so they can do final checks on the module. She hears a shuffle at the room’s entrance and lifts her head. It’s Maxwell, lingering at the doorway and with a peculiar expression on her face.

“Evening,” Lovelace says mildly, even if things like day and night are at best polite fictions on the ship.

“I…” Maxwell gives an unconvincing grin. “Haven’t heard that in a long time.”

“You grow up religious?” Lovelace asks.

“Ah. Yes. Very much so.” Maxwell drops the grin abruptly. “Sorry, I. Well.” She leaves quickly, and Lovelace blinks at the spot where she had been. It takes her a moment to remember.

“Bad relationship with her family,” Hera murmurs, plucking the thought from Lovelace’s mind.

“Should I apologize?” Lovelace tilts her head toward the nearest camera.

“How would you know it’d cause that kind of reaction?” Lovelace can almost see the shrug. “She’ll be okay; I think she was just startled.”

“If you say so.”

“I do. So, what were you singing? A hymn, right?”

“I…yeah. ‘Down by the Riverside.’ Pretty standard church fare.”

“You’ve been singing it a lot.”

“It’s got good memories attached to it.”

“Oh.” Hera seems to struggle before deciding to ask, “Could you teach it to me?”

“You haven’t picked it up yet?”

“Well, no, _Captain_ , because you only ever sing snippets.”

Lovelace exhales a laugh. “Fair,” she says. “Though I don’t know if I actually remember the whole song.”

“Could you try?”

“Sure,” Lovelace allows. “I could do that.”

***

The nightmares get worse after the events on the module. Which isn’t a surprise, but it sure as hell doesn’t help Lovelace’s already minimal sleep. She doesn’t bother even going to bed until after Hilbert has ascertained that the Jacobi in front of them is, for all intents and purposes, their Jacobi. Kepler accepts it, which means the rest of the crew is supposed to accept it. If the slightly jumpy way Jacobi, Eiffel, and Maxwell have been acting is any indication, it’s easier said than done.

After the module, Lovelace starts dreaming about members of her old crew—usually Officer Fisher, sometimes the others—banging at the hull of the ship, begging to be let inside, while the same crewmember stands next to her and begs her not to listen to it. And then she turns, and it’s her own face staring at her with huge, frightened eyes, and she wakes up to find her skin slick with sweat.

The third or fourth night this happens, she spends almost ten minutes heaving in gasping breaths, hands curled into achingly tight fists. Her chest hurts. It takes some time to get her breathing back to normal, and at that point, the adrenaline is so thick in her system that she could choke on it. She wriggles out of the sleeping bag, throws on a clean t-shirt, and starts down the familiar path to the exercise room.

It’s a small space, just large enough for a weight-lifting machine and a few cardio machines. Lovelace goes to the weights on instinct. Within ten minutes, after a few reps of bench presses, her brain is buzzing slightly less.

She lets herself have a break after a half hour, perched on the edge of the bench with a water pack in one hand. She’s letting her head hand between her knees when the speaker crackles to life.

“Captain Lovelace?”

Lovelace jerks her head up. Hera doesn’t usually bother her during these midnight workout sessions, even thought Lovelace knows perfectly well Hera can see her. She always figured Hera knows to give her at least the semblance of privacy.

“Hey,” Lovelace says. Her voice is raspy.

“Hey,” Hera echoes. “I um. I was wo-ondering. If you wanted to talk at all I…” She inhales and surges forward. “You've been sleeping worse since you came back from the module.”

“I…right.” Lovelace closes her eyes and inhales. “I appreciate that, Hera, I really do. I just, um. Could use some space right now.”

“Right!” Hera says, voice far too high. “Of course. I shouldn’t ha-ave—right. Sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

“Okay, well.” Hera pauses. “Have a good workout.”

She cuts out, and Lovelace suspects she’s fled to some far corner of the ship. Lovelace supposes, dimly, that she should have been slightly less brusque, but she still has a sour taste at the back of her throat, and she knows that if she sits still for too long, her hand will start shaking.

She goes back to bench pressing.

She manages a few more reps, but her focus is off track, and after only ten minutes, she gives up. She wipes herself down with a damp towel and heads back to her quarters. It’s another four hours until she’s due to work; she might as well see if she can get in another REM cycle.

She’s in the middle of changing out of her sweaty clothes when she heard the singing. Something low and sonorous. She pauses.

“Gonna lay down my sword and shield, down by the riverside. Down by the riverside. Down by the riverside.”

It must be in a few rooms over; it’s faint. Lovelace inhales deeply and exhales hard. She finishes changing and slips into her sleeping bag. She flicks off the light and floats in the dark, listening. Hera isn’t a chorus of baritone men, but she’s got a clear ring to her voice that carries well.

Lovelace exhales hard again and says into the darkness, “Thanks.”

Hera doesn’t answer. But the singing inches closer, until Lovelace can hear it coming out of the speakers in her own room. Hera keeps her voice low, and it’s almost like Lovelace is back in church, ten years old and surrounded by the scent of wooden pews and the old women’s perfume.

She twists around in her sleeping bag until she’s comfortable and lets her eyes shut as she listens to Hera move on to the next verse.

“Gonna lay down my heavy load, down by the riverside. Down by the riverside. Down by the riverside. Gonna lay down my heavy load, down by the riverside. Gonna study war no more.”

Lovelace means to ask Hera where she learned that part, because Lovelace knows it’s not part of what she taught Hera a few days ago. She must have asked someone else.

Except them Lovelace drifts to sleep before Hera finishes singing, and this time, she doesn’t dream at all.


End file.
